Q: Anyone have any experience with the issue below, what could be causing it, or how to fix it?
problem
We lot track most of our parts and lately have been seeing odd behavior while issuing material. For a (currently undetermined) number of parts, our expeditors stated the lot number would not come up in the Search and they have had to go to part tracker, find the part and its correct lot #, and then manually enter it in the From lot number field in Issue Material. Upon manually entering the lot, it would take it and issue it. However, today for one particular part (so far) it won’t accept the lot even when manually entered. We get the error “a valid lot number is required.”
I was able to replicate the search behavior with this particular part both in Issue Material and Inventory Transfer (transfer let me manually enter and process without error) in our Test environment (so not environment specific). A couple of months ago we did add another warehouse and this particular part and lot is split between our warehouse and production warehouses. I thought maybe that was the issue, so I transferred the quantity for that lot all into the same warehouse/bin, but still am not able to find any lots in the search, regardless of warehouse. The warehouses setup and part warehouses setup are identical other than code/description of warehouse.
have tried
In our Test environment (data a week old) I am able to complete the issue of material by manually inputting the lot. I’m going to recreate all of the transactions in Test that have happened in Live over the past week to see if I can get Test to start giving me the invalid lot error.
We’ve done a comparison of the Part, PartBin, and PartLot tables in the two environments and only differences are what you’d expect from active and stale transactions between the two.
We don’t use lots but could you have received the lot in one warehouse and not ‘transferred’ it to the newly created warehouse? In that instance, it would find inventory but no lot numbers assigned. Again, we don’t use it but just brainstorming.
The material is received into our main warehouse and then transferred as needed to our Production warehouse. That has continually happened since the prod warehouse was created. Not sure how I’d get an on hand quantity showing in a warehouse without it being transferred or received there.
That did get me thinking to check all of the transactions to make sure they add up. Everything for that warehouse, the lot, and that part number looks good on that front.
No idea what changed in the last few hours (wasn’t any transaction), but had the thought that maybe there was a lingering cycle count out there interfering with issuing the part/lot. Not sure if poking around in those screens/tables jarred something loose, but after doing so it let me issue the material to the job.
Still no idea why lots won’t show in the search like they should. Guess I’ll report that to Epicor as a potential bug.
We have seen an issue like this when the incorrect bin is selected on the issue material screen, for instance when the material is not in its default bin. But since you are able to enter the lot number manually, seems like this isn’t the case, because you would get a warning about issuing from a bin without any inventory. Still maybe worth checking out
We don’t use primary bins on our parts and since not all parts seem to be impacted (as far as I’ve been told), our default bins for receiving, shipping, etc. also don’t seem to be the cause. We get the behavior no matter which warehouse or bin combo we choose, including both blank.
I had the same thought about leading spaces and bad characters. Checked both the lot number and the part I was working with, but those checked out good.
They do show in query. At the most, it’s been like a month since we re-indexed, but I actually think that’s something that our parent company now has scheduled on our server to run every weekend.
